Elsevier Sponsors 2010 Semantic Web Challenge

Winners Announced at International Semantic Web Conference

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New York, NY, November 16, 2010

Elsevier announced the winners of the 2010 Semantic Web Challenge. The Elsevier sponsored Challenge occurred at the International Semantic Web Conference held in Shanghai, China from 7-11 November, 2010. A jury consisting of seven leading experts from both academia and industry awarded the four best applications with cash prizes exceeding 3000 Euro in total.

The semantic web is an exciting new direction in Artificial Intelligence, aiming to add meaning to information on a web-size scale. The field has been evolving over the last decade, and the Semantic Web Challenge showcases some of the most promising and exciting new applications emerging from this area.

Over the last eight years, the Challenge has attracted more than 140 entries. All submissions are evaluated rigorously by a jury composed of leading scientists and experts from industry in a 3 round knockout competition consisting of a poster session, oral presentations and live demonstrations.

Organized this year by Christian Bizer from the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and Diana Maynard from the University of Sheffield, UK, the Semantic Web Challenge consists of two categories: “Open Track” and “Billion Triples Track.” The Open Track requires that the applications can be used by ordinary people or scientists and must make use of the meaning of information on the web. The Billion Triples track requires applications to scale up to deal with huge amounts of information which has been gathered from the open web.

The winners of the 2010 Open Track challenge were the team from Stanford University comprising of Clement Jonquet, Paea LePendu, Sean M. Falconer, Adrien Coulet, Natalya F. Noy, Mark A. Musen, and Nigam H. Shah for “NCBO Resource Index: Ontology-Based Search and Mining of Biomedical Resources”. Their entry provides very clear benefits to the biomedical community, bringing together knowledge from many different entities on the web with a large corpus of scientific literature though the clever application of semantic web technologies and principles.

The second prize in the open track was awarded to the team from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute comprising of Dominic DiFranzo, Li Ding, John S. Erickson, Xian Li, Tim Lebo, James Michaelis, Alvaro Graves, Gregory Todd Williams, Jin Guang Zheng, Johanna Flores, Zhenning Shangguan, Gino Gervasio, Deborah L. McGuinness and Jim Hendler, for the development of “TWC LOGD: A Portal for Linking Open Government Data” – a massive semantic effort in opening up and linking all the public US government data, and providing the ecosystem and education for re-use.

The third prize in the 2010 Open Track was won by a combined team from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Oxford University and the University of Southern California comprising of Denny Vrandecic, Varun Ratnakar, Markus Krötzsch, and Yolanda Gil for their entry “Shortipedia” - a Web-based knowledge repository and collaborative curating system, pulling together a growing number of sources in order to provide a comprehensive, multilingual and diversived view on entities of interest – a Wikipedia on steroids.

“The award winners this year demonstrated a range of different applications which have a huge potential for widespread take up in the wider community, by presenting information from a wide range of sources in a meaningful way to the end user,” stated Chris Bizer and Diane Maynard, co-organizers of the Semantic Web Challenge. “It is interesting to see how the growth of the amount of information that is publicly available on the Semantic Web is reflected in the submissions which demonstrate the potentials opened up by this development as well as doing a good job at addressing the challenges that arise from dealing with a global data space” Said Chris Bizer and Diane Maynard.”

“Elsevier is proud to sponsor the Semantic Web Challenge once again, as it promotes the dissemination of knowledge from academia to society and industry. For example, through the SciVerce platform, we look forward to partner with this year’s winners to further enhance the discoverability of biomedical information by semantically linking our content to trusted bio-informatical gene databases. But most of all, I would like to thank all the participants, and encourage everyone to have a look at their applications online as they are all very impressive demonstrations of the power of the semantic web” said Sweitze Roffel, journal development publisher of Elsevier.

About the prizeThe Semantic Web Challenge has been organized in cooperation with the The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) since 2003 with the aim to offer participants the chance to submit their best Semantic Web Applications. The Challenge thus illustrates what the Semantic Web can provide to the world, whilst providing researchers an opportunity to showcase their work, compare it to others, and thereby stimulating current research by highlighting the state-of-the-art every year.

About the Semantic WebThe central idea of the Semantic Web is to extend the current human-readable web by encoding some of the semantics of resources in a machine-processable form. Moving beyond syntax opens the door to more advanced applications and functionality on the Web. Computers will be better able to search, process, integrate and present the content of these resources in a meaningful, intelligent manner.

About ElsevierElsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make groundbreaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions — among them ScienceDirect,
Scopus, Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey— and publishes over 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 35,000 book titles, including a number of iconic
reference works. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a world-leading provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries. www.elsevier.com